A decade after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Americans still have
a lot to learn about their own nation’s foreign policy and the
Islamic religion, according to a panel discussion hosted Thursday
by the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona
State University.

“It was an ordinary day in which ordinary people like you and I
were killed,” said Yasmin Saikia, the Hardt-Nickachos Chair in
peace studies and professor of history at ASU. “But today, again
ordinary people like you and I are sitting around this table and
trying to make sense of that catastrophe. And there are ordinary
people like you and I in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan who are
being killed. So we have to recognize that ordinary people on
ordinary days can do extraordinary things and open a new chapter of
history.”

The event was not a commemoration like many of the other events
hosted around the Valley, said Linell Cady, the panel leader and
the director for the center. Instead, it was a way to look at the
changes in American religion, politics and foreign policy from an
academic perspective.

“The major impact seemed to be that we realized that religion
could be a very powerful negative force,” said Carolyn Warner, a
professor and the Head of Faculty of ASU’s Political Science
department. “We forgot that the various ways that religion can be a
peaceful force.”

American public understanding changed after Sept. 11, 2001,
because of the terrorist attacks, said Abdullahi Gallab, assistant
professor of African and African-American studies and religious
studies at ASU.

“After Sept. 11th, our understanding of religion came of age,”
Gallab said. “Religion was found in bed with terrorism. Whatever
tranquil notions we may have had were rudely replaced by political
and often violent (connotations).”

Understanding and education of Islam has increased in the last
decade, mainly as a reaction to the fear and ignorance of the Sept.
11 attacks, Cady said.

“There is a profound sense of ignorance about Islam, as if it
were all one thing,” Cady said. “People have a limited
understanding of religion overall, but especially Islam.”

Since the attacks, there has been a changing academic world,
said Carolyn Warner

Warner wrote an article about the changes in Muslim groups in
Europe during the 1990s. When she went to publish her research in
an academic journal, the publishers rejected it.

“They said, ‘There is too much information about Islam, send it
to a Middle Eastern politics journal,’ even though I was actually
talking about the role of Islam in facilitating the peaceful
organization of Muslins in Western Europe,” Warner said.

Two years later, the article was published by the journal.

“What changed?” Warner asked. “9/11. The article didn’t
change.”

What does need to change is the American understanding of other
religions, Saikia said. As a world community, we need to learn to
live peacefully with each other.

This has been done for centuries in India, where the two largest
religions of that country, Hindu and Islam, have coexisted, Saikia
said.

“We have been getting rhetoric of hope,” Saikia said. “And we do
need hope. We need hope in hopeless times, but we also need reason.
Can we reasonably move ahead?”

Rather than hope, she suggested that people need to see each
other for who they are and recognize Muslims are regular people
too.

People should recognize that Muslims, Christians and Hindus are
not going to disappear, Saikia said. Rather than creating violence,
people should accept their fellow human beings and start the
discussion from there.

“If I (speaking for the Muslim community) can see you as a
friend and not as a master who has come to destroy my world,
perhaps we can begin a conversation,” Saikia said.

However, to do this, there has to be more effort at an
institutional level to create understanding, Saikia said.

Similar to that understanding is the way Gen. David Petraeus led
his troops in Iraq, said Sheldon Simon, professor of Political
Science at ASU.

Rather than use the same insurgency warfare tactics used in the
Vietnam War or the strong “shock and awe” heavy bombing of the
Afghan war, Petraeus used a different tactic.

“Petraeus convinced his superiors that conventional warfare in
Iraq was counterproductive,” Simon said. “He argued a new type of
counterinsurgency with a different set of goals of military
configuration.

“Petraeus’ strategy was to seize a region from the adversary,
hold and defend the population, help to rebuild the local economy,
train local security forces, and transfer responsibility to them,”
Simon said.

The military had to become accustomed to and educated in local
culture, language and religion, he said.

“The army’s main purpose (under Petraeus’ policy) isn’t to kill
the adversary, but to protect the population,” Simon said. “This
meant that soldiers would have to become policemen, social workers,
aid providers and mediators in local conflicts.”

Throughout the last decade, many things in American life have
changed, Cady said. Politics, understanding of religion and
American foreign policy have changed drastically.

The Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict was a product
of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Cady said. The planning started in
2002 and the center opened the next year.